World Evolved, A Short Story by Katie McEldowney

Part 1: The Pandemic

The year was 2020, it was late April, and the world had begun to panic. COVID-19 had attacked the human race. Starting in China, it slowly moved throughout Europe, The Pacific, and finally, the U.S. Panic soon overtook the hearts and minds of people everywhere. The media fed on the fear, thrived as they spread their ink-soaked wings over the world. Stores were raided, food was scarce, people took to their homes, distancing themselves from most of society, except for the parts they could not escape. Kassie Leroy had been one of the few who was completely alone, and she watched the world from her blinds. She saw how the world she once knew began to die off around her. Trees lost their leaves, plants began to rot, the sun hardly shone anymore, everything was dying, people were starving, animals multiplied quickly, and soon the balance of the world had been thrown out of order. Billions of people died daily from the disease, hospitals were no longer a place to find healing, but merely another place to be infected. Those who walked in rarely walked back out. 

Kassie had nightmares. Her mind was dwindling, and she often spoke to bugs that landed on her windows; she had scrawled all over her walls, trying to figure out where the virus would strike next, trying to silence the voices that screamed inside her fractured mind, but nothing worked. Days dragged, her mind becoming more and more unbalanced, and she no longer cared what the outside world looked like; she only knew the world that was in her mind.

While Kassie transformed from a typical young adult into a whirlwind of bipolar disorder with little to no socialization skills, the world outside only worsened.

The virus had evolved, making the symptoms seen in a mere hours; death was imminent in three days, no longer two weeks. The government of the people had decided to take a course of action that favored the living,, but it spread like a wildfire, and soon the world had been transformed.

People died like clockwork, but those who didn’t were forcefully taken from their homes and put in a quarantine area of living that had been rid of the virus— put in a protective field to keep the virus out. A dome-like shield surrounded the city, and as scientists figured out ways to rid surfaces and areas of the virus, the city only grew. More people were brought in and transformed into some… thing. Anything, really, as long as it stayed put. 

People were no longer free, but controlled. But, nonetheless, alive.

Some unlucky few were rejected, being deemed as “too far gone.” All their humanity lost, and their civilized need to survive became more animalistic than human. 

They were left to die where the virus was still very much alive. The world continued to trudge backwards, steps growing closer and closer to an open grave. 

Kassie was unbeknowingly one of those few who had failed to pass the reaping, and had been left to die.

The World Evolved movement started in Washington where the government still led from the White House, and it spread through West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee. No one could enter from The Outside.

2020 had come and gone, and soon 2021 overtook the world that had divided itself.

Whilst the Government felt as if they had bettered the world, Kassie’s mind dwindled away. But, as all shriveled perennials do, it grew. Kassie knew not what power she held, knew not what she was going to do, but she didn’t have to. Kassie would find her friends, and they would bring the sun back. 

If this was what ‘evolved’ looked like, well… it’s all the better that Kassie couldn’t see in the dark.